Posted on 05/01/2013 1:44:39 AM PDT by expat1000
HILLSBORO • In just a few short months, Sherrie Gavan said, her son went from a straight-A student who loved baseball and scuba diving to a listless teenager with a short fuse.
Then she figured out the cause: heroin addiction, an epidemic that has upended life for countless parents across the St. Louis area in the past five years.
Gavan told a court on Tuesday that she took desperate measures to get her son, Clayton, now 19, clean. She slept next to him as he shook and sweated through withdrawals. She enrolled him in a new school to keep him away from a bad crowd. She sent him off to live with relatives and even took him to work with her.
(Excerpt) Read more at stltoday.com ...
She should be awarded the keys to the city!
Yes, she is guilty, but let pray when sentencing is held she gets a five dollar fine.
Once you get hooked on heroin, you don’t really ever come off it. The kid might go through rehab and look ok for a week or two....but the desire will come back eventually.
Wow! Mother of the year as far as I am concerned.
“And despite the conviction, she said, she achieved what she wanted by confronting Loyd. Loyd has not contacted her son since, and Clayton has been clean for more than a year.”
Hopefully she gets off with the $1000 fine and time served. BUT - sometimes doing the right thing, even if you get punished, is worth it. Kudos for her for doing what it takes to protect her family.
Time served, fine suspended conditioned on one year unsupervised probation. Hard to believe that there was a guilty verdict at all.
They should not have convicted this woman.
I would sue her lawyer for malpractice....cannot believe a jury.....even in the most liberal of areas....would convict
Liberal logic: Pursue this case, ignore real cases. Liberalism is a disease, and this woman has demonstrated the cure, just not very forcefully.
>>Hopefully she gets off with the $1000 fine and time served.
I think that is the maximum fine.
Good to hear from you, Mesta.
Love to take a look at that jury with my baseball bat.
It is sickening that it took a jury only a very short time to come back with a GUILTY verdict. Had I been on the jury, the verdict would have gone the other way or I’d have hung the jury or done something to cause a mistrial.
This is disgusting.
"Loyd also said he could not identify Gavan in the courtroom despite the fact that she was sitting only a few feet from him."
This is exactly where jury nullification should be used. One person on the jury could have shown some common sense.
Probably not the juries fault.
The judge would have given the jury instructions. Something like “You have to decide on the facts in front of you. Did she or did she not do it? Her intent or motivation are not on trial here and not relevant. You MUST, as someone who has sworn to uphold the law, base your decision on these factors alone.”
To make her guilty no mater the sentence makes her a criminal. She is NOT the criminal
She is guilty of protecting her child... Nothing more.
The lawers and judges can pound sand...in my view
Yeah, I understand. Directions by the judge, etc. ....there still is such a thing as jury nullification, regardless of what a judge, or a misapplied law for that matter, says.
If the judge doesn’t like it (their nullification) he can in many cases overrule the verdict and supply his own.
AFAIK, the judge deciding a verdict can only work this way:
If the jury finds the accused guilty, the Judge can override that and declare them not guilty.
But if a jury finds them not guilty, set, match, game over. That’s the whole point of the jury, so that it’s not some big wig high paid snob deciding cases.
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